That's cool! Some immediate UI feedback after search button is clicked would be nice, I had to press it several times until I noticed some feedback. Maybe just disable it once clicked, my 2 cents
The running costs are very low. Since posting it today we burned 30 cents in DeepSeek inference. Postgres instance though costs me $40 a month on Railway; mostly due to RAM usage during to HNSW incremental update.
Daily updates I do on my m4 mac air: takes about 5 minutes to process roughly 10k fresh comments. Historic backfill was done on an Nvidia GPU rented on vast.ai for a few dollars. If I recall correctly took about an hour or so. It’s mentioned in the README.md on GitHub.
GDPR still holds, so I don’t see why not if that’s what your request is under.
However, it’s out there- and you have no idea where, so there’s not really a moral or feasible way to get rid of it everywhere. (Please don’t nuke the world just to clean your rep.)
The law (at least, in the EU) grants a legal right to privacy, and the motivation behind it is really none of anyone’s business.
Maybe commenters face threats to safety. Maybe commenters didn’t think AI companies profiting off of their non-commercial conversations would ever exist and wouldn’t have put data out there if that was disclosed ahead of time.
Corporations have an unlimited right to bully and threaten to take down embarrassing content and hide their mistakes, they have greatly enhanced leverage over copyright enforcement compared to individuals, but then if individuals do a much less egregious thing to try and take down their content they don’t even get paid for it’s immoral.
This community financially benefits YCombinator and its portfolio companies. Without our contributions, readership, and comments, their ability to hire and recruit founders is diminished. They don’t provide a delete button for profit-motivated reasons, and privacy laws like GDPR guard against that.
(As you might guess, I am personally quite against HN’s policy forbidding most forms of content deletion. Their policy and solution involving manual modifications via the moderation team makes no sense - every other social media platform lets you delete your content)
Finally someone mentioned it. I'm surprised all the "tech enthusiasts" here turn a blind eye when it's their own community, but if it's someone else's then it's atrocious.
Source is at https://github.com/afiodorov/hn-search